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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 4, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Any thoughts on what stock one ought to buy right now, as someone whose gradual getting spooked by AI advances has finally passed a critical threshold, in order to be in a good position in the specific subspace of possible futures where most humans have become economically worthless but the current system of contracts and titles remains intact?

Specifically, the "the vast majority of the economy is one or a handful of AI conglomerates, plus whatever industry is required to keep them running; whoever has a share may be less screwed" scenario. I can just about think of Google (for DeepMind) and Microsoft (who seem to be OpenAI's closest openly traded partner), and maybe Nvidia if one expects their GPUs to continue being unrivaled as hardware platforms.

I don't know, is it inconceivable that UBI+light wireheading through superstimuli could keep the vast majority of people sufficiently placid to prevent widespread upheaval until the problem solves itself through birthrate collapse? This would have the same effect as a genocide of the poor, but not involve a lot of violence or even generally offense to revealed ethical preference.

Capitalism relies on a social contract in which people have the opportunity to better their situation. The end of employment takes away that opportunity.

I'm not so convinced of this, insofar as my impression is that over the past 1000 years, most societies were sufficiently "capitalist" in the sense that private property and ownership stakes were mostly honoured most of the time, but in the majority of them most people did not have a meaningful opportunity to significantly better their situation.

In practice, if you run the numbers, UBI requires redistribution to increase substantially. ... Maybe the singularity brings such unimaginable abundance that money ceases to have any relevance, but even if it does there will still be a transition period.

A classic joke:

– Vodka has gone up in price, son.

– So Daddy, now you'll drink less?

– No son, but you'll have less to eat.

What I mean to say is that there are other solutions to the problem of unproductive masses, and they don't involve either outright genocide nor communism. Such as...

The government had finally figured out that giving choices to people on welfare was not such a great idea, and it was also expensive. Instead of giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare recipients directly into government housing and serving them meals in a cafeteria. If the government could drive the cost of that housing and food down, it minimized the amount of money they had to spend per welfare recipient.

As the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum occupancy. They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV — the world’s best pacifier. During the day the bed was a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a sheet and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived they had just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of people in each building. Burt was not excited to see me when I arrived — he had had a private room for 10 years, and my arrival was the end of that. At least he was polite about it.

... Downstairs there was the cafeteria staffed by robots. The robots were not bad — the food was acceptable. They also kept the bathrooms, hallways and rooms spotless. Every day at 7AM, 12 PM and 6 PM the breakfast, lunch and dinner meal shifts began. There were six 15-minute shifts per meal to save on cafeteria space. Burt and I had the third shift. You sat down, food was served, you ate, you talked for 5 minutes while you drank your “coffee” and you left so the next shift could come in. With 24,000 people coming in per shift, there was no time for standing in a cafeteria-style line. Everyone had an assigned seat, and an army of robots served you right at your table.

... Because no one had a window, they could really pack people into these buildings. Each terrafoam dorm building had a four-acre foot print. It was a perfect 417 foot by 417 foot by 417 foot solid brown cube. Each cube originally held exactly 76,800 people. Doubling this to 153,600 people in each building was unthinkable, but they were doing it anyway. On the other hand, you had to marvel at the efficiency. At that density, they could house every welfare recipient in the entire country in less than 1,500 of these buildings. By spacing the buildings 100 feet apart, they could house 200,000,000 people in a space of less than 20 square miles if they had wanted to. At that density, they could put everyone in the country without a job into a space less than five miles square in size, put a fence around it and forget about us. If they accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb or two on us, we would all be gone and they wouldn’t have to worry about us anymore.

.. Ultimately, you would expect that there would be riots across America. But the people could not riot. The terrorist scares at the beginning of the century had caused a number of important changes. Eventually, there were video security cameras and microphones covering and recording nearly every square inch of public space in America. There were taps on all phone conversations and Internet messages sniffing for terrorist clues. If anyone thought about starting a protest rally or a riot, or discussed any form of civil disobedience with anyone else, he was branded a terrorist and preemptively put in jail. Combine that with robotic security forces, and riots are impossible.

The only solution for most people, as they became unemployed, was government handouts. Terrafoam housing was what the government handed out.

I guess we shall see how China deals with more unrest. The surveillance aspect already happens in most western countries anyway, tho I assume China acts on it more (see the aftermath of the recent protests in china - police searching people’s phones for western apps and pictures/videos etc, or Chinese cops using relatives still in china to force ppl in australia to delete tweets etc). AI will be insane in china in the near future. I mean they can already ID you based on your walking gait…

Ironically @2rafa is a big fan of this particular technology, gait recognition, as a tool for suppressing violent crime. It's not like those programs and models are secret – any developed nation can do it.

But of course only rather intangible things such as «social contract» can stop the state from redefining most any dissent to crime.

It kind of seems like the PMC class defense strategy here is to regulatorily require human bureaucrats for ‘compliance audits’, complete with required certification, and tell the call center workers who actually get replaced to smoke weed on the dole or do sex work.

Capital’s interests are to tell the PMC to get stuffed, and the red tribe’s interests are to let automation take its course, rather than making special exceptions for the PMC(who would not, after all, return the favor). The last human to be fired will be a security guard previously overseeing Jose the Guatemalan peach picker somewhere in Georgia, after all, and the third to last will be Joe the plumber.

I predict a red-tribe/capital alliance arrayed against the PMC with hangers on as a response to accelerating automation, and that’s essentially exactly what we have.